Tarot Quick Fact: Early card decks from Spain featured four suites: coins, cups, swords, and polo sticks. Bet you’re giggling about the polo stick huh? I did too.

When these cards turned up in Europe around 1375, Europeans, who enjoyed a good card game never heard of a polo stick. Therefore they used “wands.”

Many Tarot decks reserve these suit names. With a modern deck of regular playing cards, these suits are as follows: diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs.

Can you imagine how drunk one would get at a card game if every time someone slipped up and said clubs instead of polo sticks? Would be an interesting way to liven things up now wouldn’t it?

Experiment: Does one of the trump cards in your tarot deck represent qualities you admire, but you do not see in yourself? For me it’s the self control of the “strength” card.

Make this quality that you do not see in yourself, your weekly goal. I encourage you to take that card from your deck and put it somewhere you can see it, for at least a week or so. Write down in your journal at the end of each day what you may have done to practice that skill, and by the end of the week you might surprise yourself at just how much closer to your goal you are.

Once upon a time, somewhere on the www, I found uncoloured line-drawn copies of the RWS cards. I have found it very useful to colour my own as a tarot exercise, and am always pleasantly surprised by what is revealed to me in the process. Perhaps it’s because I look at the cards differently during the process of colouring them, seeing details I had not noticed before.

An example of this is the Three of Swords card. When I spent time colouring this card in I unexpectedly noticed that the swords were sharp upon entering the heart but blunt upon exiting it! Something changed the blades in the process of piercing the heart! This was something I had really not noticed before colouring in my own Three of Swords card. I also noticed for the first time that it was raining (in the card)! In these unexpected discoveries lie exciting new layers of possible interpretations to further enhance our reading abilities.

I kept the line-drawings and am making them available here for download. Perhaps you’d like to give this exercise a try too? If you do, let me know what new revelations you uncover!

Apologies for the ‘order’ (disorder) that these are in, but it seems all 78 cards are here. I have listed the cards that appear on each page below, with links to download the pdf documents.

joie de vivre ˌʒwɑː də ˈviːvr(ə),French ʒwad vivʀ/ noun: exuberant enjoyment of life. What better way to start off 2016 than with a new deck! Hop along in this Tarot Professionals Blog-Hop by following the links below: Thanks to Fiona Benjamin for organising the TP blog-hop, hopefully the first of many monthly hops to come. Previous blog Master List […]

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We think God is only ‘good’ or ‘just.’ God is everything, everywhere. Nothing can exist without the particle we call God. When we see that there is no division, no lack, no right or wrong, we recognise the splendour of unity, the wonder of oneness. Then we begin to recognise ourselves as God. However, it is our destiny to always seek divinity just as we are divinity, therein lies the great paradox. - JbR 2014